Hi,

Pretty new to lossless audio so...

Decompressing a 275 Mb .ape file takes about 15 minutes or so using Monkey's Audio 3.99F.

Is that *normal*?

I'm using a P4 2.4 GHz, 512 Mb RAM.

By contrast a 300 Mb FLAC file decompresses in about 2 minutes!

TIA

Depends on what compression level was used when encoding...

With FLAC the compression level does not affect decoding speed.

I would say that is abnormal, but as Jan said it depends on the compression used. As a quick test using Foobar, I just decoded 505 MB worth of APE files (The Needfire: A Celtic Celebration) to 773 MB worth of wave files in exactly 2 minutes and 46 seconds. All files were encoded at -c3000 (high) using EAC+MAC. I'm on a P4 2.66 with 1024 MB of RAM.

Edit: Added a bit more detail on file sizes.

Sounds like an 'insane' encode.

Stick to high or extra high, insane is hardly worth the extra compression/decompression time.

Thank you for the replies, and yes you were right, it turns out the file was encoded using the 'insane' setting! Should have RTFM I guess.

I re-compressed/decompressed the .wav at normal and high and got these results:

----------Compress Decompress
Normal--249s-------152s
High-----309s-------182s

Much better.

Saving in Mb between the insane and high settings was only 7Mb! Hardly worth the wait time really.

Have you given extra high a try?

Ok;

Extra High
Compress = 533s
Decompress = 275s!

Difference in Mb between insane and extra high now only 2 Mb, but huge time saving in decompression.

I've actually been using Insane lately on my P4 1.4Ghz. It takes rediculously long to encode but I need every last MB. I just leave it on when I leave the computer for a while as it tends to suck my system dry if I attempt other tasks simultaneously.

If you obviously care that little about actual usability, in favour of maximum compression, then why not go for La or OptimFROG?